Sunday afternoon, the Major League Baseball Players Association denounced rumors that some players may boycott spring training. Players and agents have been unhappy with a slow free-agent market this year, in which top players such as World-Series-champion Jake Arrieta and All-Stars Yu Darvish and J.D. Martinez remain unsigned. On Friday, “Super-Agent” Brodie Van Wagenen, the Co-Head of Baseball for CAA, may have catalyzed this rumor via Twitter when he suggested both that owners may be colluding and that a “boycott of Spring Training may be a starting point, if behavior doesn’t change.” Given that the current Collective Bargaining Agreement between MLB and the MLBPA remains valid through 2021, a spring-training boycott would likely be a violation of national labor laws.

On Thursday, NBC News interviewed AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka about immigration. Trumka pushed back on President Trump’s talking points from Tuesday’s State of the Union Address, stating that organized labor has “a moral obligation to help [undocumented] workers.” In 2013, Trumka played a key role in getting an immigration-reform bill approved by the Senate.

On August 7th, Missouri voters will decide the fate of Prop. A — a ballot initiative that could repeal the state’s newly passed “right-to-work” law. Last year, then-Governor Eric Greitens signed Senate Bill 19, a so-called “right-to-work” bill that poses a dir... More »

About OnLabor

OnLabor is a blog dev­oted to workers, unions, and their politics. We in­ter­pret our sub­ject broadly to in­clude the cur­rent cri­sis in the tra­di­tional union move­ment (why union de­cline is hap­pen­ing and what it means for our so­ci­ety); the new and con­tested forms of worker or­ga­ni­za­tion that are fill­ing the la­bor union gap; how work ought to be struc­tured and man­aged; how work­ers ought to be rep­re­sented and com­pen­sated; and the ap­pro­pri­ate role of gov­ern­ment – all three branches – in each of these is­sues.